Happy May Day

May 1 is an important holiday to communists who refer to it as International Workers' Day or similar. So what are communists doing this year? NPR reports:

    The "May Day Strong" protest events in various cities, ranging geographically from Boston to San Francisco, are meant to mark International Labor Day. They follow anti-Trump protests under the "No Kings" banner that organizers say have drawn millions of people nationwide. 

 [snip]

    The National Education Association — the nation's largest labor union, with 3 million members — is a key organizer of Friday's protests. NEA President Becky Pringle told NPR that the message this year is that the country should be "focusing on workers over billionaires."

    "We know there are bus drivers in New York and teachers in Idaho and nurses in Louisiana who are feeling the impact of a system that has decided … to put billionaires ahead of everyone else," she said, while "cutting services like public education that this country has made to our kids and impact our future."

    Organizers say more than 500 labor unions, student groups, community organizations and other groups will participate. One of those student groups, Sunrise Movement, which bills itself as "young people fighting fascism to win a Green New Deal," said that more than 100,000 students were expected to miss school, in what it called a "strike."

    In North Carolina, where the NEA says per-pupil spending and teacher salaries rank near the bottom nationwide, some 20 public school districts will be closed due to planned staff absences. The NEA says educators and school workers, such as bus drivers, cafeteria workers and maintenance staff, are planning to rally in the capital, Raleigh, to pressure the state legislature for more education funding. 

It goes on to list other school districts around the country that are shutting down of the communist holiday. But it is not just teachers' unions. The Guardian reports:

    Thousands are expected to join an economic blackout for International Workers’ Day , as part of 3,500 “May Day Strong” events across the country today. Organizers are calling for “no school, no work, no shopping” with walkouts, marches, block parties and other gatherings planned into the evening.

    On the east coast, protests were already under way by the early morning. In Manhattan, a group of Amazon workers, Teamsters and local politicians marched from the New York public library’s main branch to Amazon’s nearby corporate offices to demand the corporation cut its contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In the nation’s capital, protesters with the organization Free DC shut down intersections across the city, holding handmade banners reading “Workers over billionaires” and “Healthcare not warfare”.

    By midday, six protesters with youth-led Sunrise Movement were arrested for blocking a bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In Portland, Oregon, Sunrise protesters occupied a Hilton hotel lobby where DHS officials are allegedly staying.

    May Day has long been an annual day of protest for the labor movement, and this year, many active movements are converging to demand no ICE, no war, and taxing the rich. The May Day Strong coalition includes labor unions, immigrants rights groups, political organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, and the organizers behind the No Kings protests. Friday’s economic disruption builds on a similar coordinated effort out of Minnesota in January, when tens of thousands of Twin Cities residents took off from school and work to flood the streets in protest of federal immigration agents storming the city. 

So what are they protesting for? Meaning, what would they do if they got control of the country?  

     There is a heuristic being bandied about that says: "The purpose of a system is what it does." So today is a good day to remember what communism does. From "100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead" by David Satter.

    In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”

    This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”

    Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.

    The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.

    To this list should be added nearly a million Gulag prisoners released during World War II into Red Army penal battalions, where they faced almost certain death; the partisans and civilians killed in the postwar revolts against Soviet rule in Ukraine and the Baltics; and dying Gulag inmates freed so that their deaths would not count in official statistics.

    If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.

The only real flaw with Satter's analysis is that he relegates communism to the past, whereas communism and its bastard offspring, Critical Theory, live on in groups such as Antifa, BLM, the Democratic Socialists of America, practically any group that employs "community organizers" and, evidently, the NEA. They may say they stand or support policies or practices that sound good, list some lofty goals, but that isn't what communist history shows. As noted, "the purpose of an organization is what it does"; or, as Christ phrased it, "Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." And so far, their fruits in the United States have been multiple political assassinations and assassination attempts, blocking roads and highways, beating up innocent people, defending criminals, urging that violent criminals be turned loose to pray on the public, rioting, looting, undermining and cheating at elections, subverting the intelligence community to make up lies whole cloth to remove a president they don't like, conspiring to allow the invasion of the country by the third world, and otherwise being agents of chaos. If they were to achieve the political power they desire, death camps and gulags would not be far behind.